When I first wrote this, I was afraid to put the name of the town down for some reason I can't recall anymore. Now, almost a year later I don't have that issue. For those wondering where Through the years takes place, Tracy's current home is halfway between Palermo CA and Oroville CA.
Palermo is a small town, south of Oroville and the location for Tracy's old school. I went there from the 5th grade to the 8th, was a cool school. In fact, till about 10 years ago, it used to take students from Preschool to 8th grade. And an interesting side note, there was a pair of teachers there, twin brothers, who still are there and teaching. Talk about awesome, I think they are reaching almost 65 or 70 by now, but then when I was there, there was a 70 year old teacher and she opassed away before she retired. She was the teacher that everyone wanted because she was so darn cool.

here are the wiki links to the towns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo,_California

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville,_California

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chico,_California (The town they went to with the University just recently.)

I grew up in that town for many years, about 28 of them. Back in the 80's the mindset of the town was bad. We had an arcade that got closed down because the manager or owner (I forget which, it was over 30 years ago) was sleeping with minors at work. After this, the town counsel insisted that everything for kids would bring the bad element and they denied it, but wondered why drug use was so high. So if you didn't like the great outdoors, you became a hooligan. They finally got a skate park about 8 years ago I think. There are Indian Casinos there now too, in fact, one is less them half a mile from my parents house, who still live near the place I think of when I write William and Maggie's home.

Over Fathers day I learned that someone bought a piece of property just down the road from my parents a few years back and he's cleared off the trees and made a private Rodeo there. They mostly do calf roping and my father (who is about 68 years old) is the guy working the chute to let the cows out. Never pictured my father to be a rodeo hand.

When I write Through the years, I can still smell things, like the scent in the back field where the wild licorice grew. My Grandmother's place (the basis for Modine Patterson) after she made her apple pie for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. (Was a rule. My father hated most pie except apple, so there was at least one at each family meal and he got the first slice. I usually took the second. The trees in bloom (we had 15 acres of olive Trees, two apple, one red, one green, one fig tree, three pomegranate and three pecan trees)

Then there was the fun of cleaning off Sap from the pecan trees that were in the front yard. Or the pecans hitting the metal roof our old home when they fell from the tree. See our old home, the one I grew up in had been a chicken coop in the 1930's, till the original house burned down and the owners moved in to the coop and expanded it. I am not kidding. The wiring was substandard, the bathroom was added in late 1960's and when we moved there in 1975 there was still an outhouse on the property.

My mother used to joke that our home was Air conditioned in the wintertime. Like I wrote in a Tracy story, we actually had animals come up through the floor boards in the bathroom, while you were doing your business. When I was about 6, I went in there and a bat flew past me, freaked me right out and took almost ten minutes to figure out what I was ranting about. But despite how bad the place was, I miss it at times. The smell of the wood in the old Potbelly stove. My mother putting something on top of the potbelly stove to cook, just to show us how it was done in the old days.

And I'm not sure if this will ever come into play, but Maggie's parent's hail from Burns Wyoming, at the current moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns,_Wyoming

Kicking around the idea of Tracy going there, but not too sure about that.

So there you go, small peek into the local area that is the current location of Through the years.